


Come to Be

by JaqofSpades



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Multi, actively shipping Clarke Griffin/self-knowledge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 12:16:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3609768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke has always known exactly who she was, but then came the Ground.  Now, all she wants is the chance to become someone else, and until she figures out who that is, she refuses to have anyone in her life.  Lexa was the one who said it, after all: love is weakness, so she should understand.  But Bellamy - Bellamy had scorched her soul with the words of an old Earth poet: “And because of love, you will, I will, we will, come to be.”  </p><p>Or, how Clarke Griffin attempts to get her head on straight after the events of Season Two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come to Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HappilyShanghaied](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HappilyShanghaied/gifts).



> A gift for [happilyshanghaied](http://happilyshanghaied.tumblr.com/) on the occasion of her big number birthday a few days back. Here's to being grown up and able to appreciate the thorny beauty of the OT3 :D
> 
> Title and thematic inspiration taken from the glorious Sonnet LXIX by Pablo Neruda:
> 
> Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,  
> without your going, that cuts noon light  
> like a blue flower, without your passing  
> later through fog and stones,  
> without the torch you lift in your hand  
> that others may not see as golden,  
> that perhaps no one believed blossomed  
> the glowing origin of the rose,  
> without, in the end, your being, your coming  
> suddenly, inspiringly, to know my life,  
> blaze of the rose-tree, wheat of the breeze:  
> and it follows that I am, because you are:  
> it follows from ‘you are’, that I am, and we:  
> and, because of love, you will, I will,  
> We will, come to be.

Glorious art by i will try_to carry on

*

**Act I: To be without**

Lexa is a woman of war. Clarke knows this, believes it implicitly, until the moment the Grounder commander stares into her eyes and speaks of trust, and survival. It’s not the first time the air has trembled thick and heavy between them, but it’s the first time uncompromising, proud Lexa has backed down on anything. Clarke tries to hide her surprise, babbles something about how life should be about more than just surviving, and then everything she thought she knew falls away, demolished by a kiss as soft as peace. 

Sweet and slow to start, Lexa tugs at Clarke’s top lip, then turns her attention to the lower, teasing it until Clarke opens her mouth on a sigh. The kiss deepens then, but stays soft, so soft, Lexa’s tongue licking into Clarke’s mouth with such delicacy that all she can do is breathe, and taste, and bask in the unimaginable rush of pure feeling. 

Then desire hits her like a slap, Clarke gasping as it claws at her belly and banishes peace with heat and want. Their lips are less gentle now, nipping and pulling, their tongues twining together and bodies straining against each other. Clarke is ready to pull Lexa down onto the pile of furs in the corner when something – a look, a sound, a noise – triggers a deluge of memories. An invading army screaming as it burns. A broken boy tied to a stake. The “I love you” that had rattled about in the hollow spaces of her soul, leaving only questions.

Every unwelcome answer that had screamed through her as she watched Bellamy march away, her sacrifice to their people in Mt Weather.

She had no right to peace. No business seeking it with the woman who had …

Not Lexa’s fault, her stubborn conscience insists. It had been Bellamy’s suggestion, their plan, her decision to let him go. And he wouldn’t begrudge her this, not when she needed it so much. Lexa could be everything, if she let her. Lover, mentor, ally, saviour … but it’s too late. Her fingers have slid from Lexa’s waist, and bit by bit, the heat is seeping from her skin.

Clarke stills, unable to still the shrieking inside, and when Lexa steps in closer to kiss her again, can’t help but jerk away a little. She wants this, so much it scares her, but, but …

“I’m sorry. I’m not ready to be with anyone.” Not yet, she thinks, then startles when she realises that she’d actually said that too.

Lexa merely blinks, her face so blank that Clarke wonders if she’d imagined the whirlwind of emotion that had risen between them. (They’d talked of trust, she knows. And something about life being more than just survival. And then, Lexa’s lips on hers, Lexa’s body under her hands, Lexa’s fire igniting her own.) A whirlwind indeed: fast and unpredictable. Destructive where it lingers. Thank you, Earth Skills.

Now, if only she’d been paying more attention the week they’d been taught about body language. There’s something behind that mask, but she’s damned if she knows what. There’s something in the twist of her lips that suggests a sadness. Disappointment, perhaps, or … resignation. 

She’d asked about Bellamy, Clarke remembers suddenly. _“You care about him.”_ She knows. 

(What, Clarke? What does she know? How can she know anything when you haven’t figured it out yet?)

Sometimes, her snarky inner voice sounds so much like her mother than Clarke wants to slap herself. Yes, it’s hysterical how she refuses to face up to her feelings for Bellamy. She’s practically rolling her own eyes. But there’s so much that could go wrong, so many ways it could turn out badly, and not just for her, or him. For everyone.

So she runs. Deflects. Hides.

From Bellamy, and from Lexa. Afraid of them both. (Afraid of who they want her to be).

Clarke hides her shame and forces her attention back to the map table, pretending it has her full attention until her brain finally catches up, the variables and the risk factors and the range of outcomes clink-clink-clinking over and over until the camp is quiet.

“Sleep, Clarke,” Lexa snarls eventually, and she drops into the pile of furs on the opposite side of the room only because she’d been raised not to be a bad houseguest.

(She hadn’t been raised to abandon innocents to the slaughter, either, but that hadn’t stopped her when the bombs fell on Ton DC. ) 

Clarke can hear them crying in her dream, black blistering faces looking to the sky, and the noise, and everything alight as the blast pushed them flat. She screams and wails, but there’s nothing she can do for them, nothing. Then Bellamy is there, leading them to safety, soothing them, telling her they’d be alright. She puts her head on his chest, and believes him, and there’s no “I’m not ready,” or “not yet”, simply his arms around her, so strong, and his hands in her hair, anchoring her. 

Then his lips are on her mouth, and lower than that, too, ghosting across her belly before settling between her legs, pleasure building as sharp and hot as the noonday sun, while the moon kisses her mouth, sweet and slow. Lexa grins up at her as she works her way down Clarke’s body to crouch next to Bellamy, one hand tangling in his riot of curls as the other snatches her wicked knife from thin air, and slashes it across his throat.

Clarke wakes with a shout and scuttles backwards until she finds her bearings: the central platform covered in maps, the side table with its clutter of bowls and glasses, the dark shape on the other side of the room, eyes glinting in the halflight of the dying fire. Lexa’s tent. No Bellamy. No knife. 

Lexa. 

“You were calling his name,” she offers, voice a silken thread in the darkness. “I’m no one’s second, Clarke.”

She’s too shaken for anything other than honesty. “You weren’t. You wouldn’t be. We were - ” what, exactly? Fucking our way through our issues? Trusting each other? Neither was true. “It was just a dream.”

“Dreams are simply the truths we cannot face in the daytime.” 

She blinks at that, and thinks of Bellamy, his blood splashing over the bed even as she arched into the pleasure he was giving her. The only truth there lay in her own greed. She wanted them both, and the blood, the blood – just her conscience torturing her, warning her that real or imagined, it could only end badly.

“Rest, Clarke. We likely march tomorrow.”

Sound advice, but her body is thrumming with adrenaline, poised for fight or flight or anything else able to kill this shuddering state of expectation. Ignoring your conscience gets easier with practice, Clarke finds.

Her thighs are still sticky with imagined pleasure when she pushes herself to her feet and takes the last few strides to Lexa’s sleeping area. “Help me sleep, then.”

Lexa rears up on her knees. Without her war paint, she looks infinitely younger. More beautiful, Clarke thinks. Less fearsome. She’s almost deceived until Lexa speaks, steel-edged. “What has changed?”

Something in the other woman’s eyes tells Clarke she could sink down beside Lexa and kiss her objections away. Seduce her – and herself - into ignoring the relentless yammer in her head, all the whys and how longs and what happens next. To be without –  
“Clarke?”

Even on her knees, even reaching up to slide her hands over Clarke’s leather-covered thighs, the Commander is no less commanding. Her hands stop tantalisingly close to the fastening of her pants, waiting, and Clarke bites down on the curse that threatens to spring from the back of her throat. She could grab Lexa’s hands and move them higher, or take the initiative and present herself to Lexa, bare.

But Clarke wouldn’t. Clarke can’t. Bare is too hard, when honesty hurts this much.

So maybe she can’t be Clarke anymore.

(They’d been out on the wall, waiting for the Grounder attack. Talking about school, of all things. Clarke had taken her core classes in medicine, but admitted to enjoying her electives more, a crazy mishmash of fine arts and politics. Bellamy’s smile had been bitter, and she couldn’t figure out why until he’d told her there had been no electives on Factory station. Every bit of history he knew, every bit of poetry … 

“You know poetry?” she’d asked, and he’d cocked a brow and whispered a tumble of syllables into the noisy din of night on the Ground. It was Spanish, she thought, the sibilance so beautiful she couldn’t bear to hear it in English, but her heart burned to know what it meant. He had shrugged, and said it was about love.

“And how other people help shape you, I guess. 'And because of love, you will, I will, we will, come to be.' Chilean dude named Neruda. Old Earth.”

They’d been quiet after that, each of them careful not to catch the other stealing glances. Bellamy Blake wasn’t who she thought he was, she remembers marvelling. Who was he? Useful, certainly, and glorious to watch, but ... anything more? Surely not.)

Always so certain, Clarke, she thinks sourly, her head full of Bellamy as she gazes into the eyes of another warrior she’s can’t even pretend to know. Lexa’s are light compared to Bellamy’s coffee brown, but they look at her in the same way, all liquid warmth daring her to reach out and risk the burn. 

It was the medical training, she’d told Octavia once. Made her risk averse.

She tangles one hand in Lexa’s untamed tumble of hair, unpinned for the night and wilder than Clarke has ever seen it. The angular face staring up at her seems to glow in the darkness of the command tent, so beautiful it makes the artist inside ache. This is the leader who insisted on concealing the truth about Ton DC, Clarke reminds herself. This is the woman whose first instinct was to kill Octavia to protect their secret.

She doesn’t care, pressing her hips into Lexa’s hands and tracing the line of her jaw with wondering fingertips. 

“This isn’t love,” she warns, hoping the darkness can hide how brittle she feels. Exposed, and hungry, and angry. Aroused. “I think I’m in love with Bellamy. But - ” she lets her fingers finish the sentence, drifting to the corner of Lexa’s mouth, just waiting to be let inside.

“You are here. And we are alive, and may not be tomorrow,” Lexa says fiercely, but still waits for a nod of assent. When Clarke gives it, her ally makes a fierce noise of triumph, then busies herself tearing at the fastenings of the leather pants.

“Take what you deserve,” Lexa orders, sucking Clarke’s fingers into her mouth as her own slide between damp folds to cover themselves in slick, slippery glory. It’s only moments – or maybe minutes, possibly hours – before Clarke’s knees start to buckle and she lets herself fall on top of her lover, mouths crashing together once more. 

It’s not love. It could be war, her heartbeat thunders as she yanks at Lexa’s clothes. At the very least a fragile, false peace. But she’ll take that, and happily, Clarke vows. 

This war, this woman – maybe they are who she is now. _It follows, from ‘you are’, that I am, and we._ Not everything, perhaps, but definitely a part of who she is coming to be.


End file.
